Reviews

There's a unique charm in a film suggested by its stills, an absence wrought by politics. Hope Eisenstein did hide away a copy that shows up but am as happy for the fragments as I am for the misnamed Elgin marbles.

I've read a bit about Chechnya and the brutality of its regime and recall the stories of its brutal crackdown against LGBT people {stories which rarely make the news now) so I was expecting this doco to be a hard slog. The makers were deft at taking us on the underground railway of the network which saves gay and lesbian people by sneaking them out of Chechnya. We see the best qualities of humanity in the folk who risk so much to help others from being persecuted for being who they are. I was worried there'd be too many descriptions of torture and bashings etc. but they were just enough to give a sense of the horrors being committed. It was disheartening to hear how the people doing good are finding it harder to get asylum for the threatened. It's ad if the world is turning a blind eye. The film presents a forceful argument that persecution of a group in society is an ever present threat when leaders have impunity to express their dictatorial side: looking at you Putin and Trump.

I had a thought after seeing Blindspotting and this that they share a similarity in turning to fantastic realism to speak to our moment of social ills like racism and capitalism... in the US... in Oakland. There's a surreal absurdity teasing out relations of inequality that is more compelling and brutally honest than the evening news these days. These is new protest film.

I am disgusted by this film. It is an appalling apology for the use of drone strikes. It uses an entirely contrived scenario of UK involvement in a drone strike in Kenya to stop a "ticking bomb" of a suicide bomber assumed to be setting out to kill scores of innocents at a shopping mall. The whole process is feminized, with women's feelings for a potential little girl's death as collateral damage affecting the mission and giving the impression their is healthy moral oversight. The film seems to be saying it's a hard choice to conduct targetted assassinations like this, but it's worth it for the greater good of saving more lives. It only gets the one point instead of zero from me because it mocks the callous disregard of the onlooking US personnel having no qualms about letting the drones rip with their deathly destruction. Still I would have liked some suggestion that US drone strikes have killed far more innocent civilians than targets, thus serving as a recruiting seargent for extremists, and that they almost always violate international law and the sovereignty of other nations.